Archive for the 'A bit of a rant' Category

It's that time again. The annual Vascular Review. It's always a good indicator of how provincial our NHS is.

My GP's surgery is in Leicestershire and if I need specialist treatment they refer me to one of the three Leicester hospitals which use a common networked data system so there's a shared data repository. The edited highlights, such as blood-test results, treatment regimes and medical procedures are communicated to my GP. It's not rocket-science.

At that same Leicestershire GP surgery is a Vascular Clinic (VC) where they monitor "those who have a medical history of Coronary Heart Disease (Heart Attacks and Angina), Strokes or Mini-Strokes and Peripheral Vascular Disease". Once a year they take your bloods, send them off for testing, and later they call you back in for a review. The VC team works independently, keeps its own records, and sends the bloods for testing at The George Eliot over the border in Warwickshire.

But there are problems... the Leicestershire data system and the Warwickshire data system don't interact very well at all, and access to one does not necessarily give access to the other.

So on the one hand we have GPs who get the data from the Leicester hospitals, and on the other hand we have the VC team which gets the Warwickshire blood-test results but can't access any of the 137 blood-test results that the Leicester hospitals have on record for me from FBC/cholesterol/ferritin/glucose tests done during the last 20 months (including 21 test results since the previous Vascular Review), tests which will continue to be done on a frequent basis for at least another 16 months, and intermittently after that until I fall off the perch of mortality and go on to mime in the Norwegian Blue Choir.

It would be so easy if the VC team could use either the phone or the computer to call up my most-recent test-results (13th July 2017 at The Royal), review them, and then either phone me or send me a letter telling me that I don't need to attend because all is well. I already know that all is well - the team at The Royal is currently checking these things at least once every two months, not once every 12 months.

But no, that's far too simple and therefore it can't be done. Instead, to maintain the unnecessary complexity and wastefulness that the NHS has become inured to, I had to attend an appointment at the VC for another needle in the arm (but, strangely, they did no standard obs such as blood pressures, heart-rate, respiration and sats), and now I'm waiting to be called in for another appointment at the VC for a review of the results when they become available. It's unlikely that anything bad will show up, but if it does it'll mean yet another appointment with the GP which will probably result in a referral to one of the three Leicester hospitals, thus perpetuating the data disconnect.

And only after midday today did we find out about the following, via a friend who emailed me today after himself finding out about it only a few hours beforehand.

Of course, by then it was too late to re-jig my evening and far too late to submit any questions:

Of the people we've talked to about this, nobody noticed anything about it in the local free magazines and papers, nobody noticed any posters around the village, nor around the town (nor in the pub loos), and nobody received any flyers through the door.

When it comes to General Elections I've never had any problems choosing which candidate got my vote... until this one.

We have only four parties vying for the top spot here:

and I have misgivings about all of them.

LibDems: They've had my vote before, and their candidate stands the best chance of ousting our current absentee-landlord, but after Clegg broke his tuition fees pledge while polishing Cameron's buttocks I don't think that I can bring myself to trust the LibDems again.

Labour: Well, when your head honcho has played poker with his cards face-up by ruling out ever using Britain’s nuclear deterrent (thus making it no deterrent whatsoever) and whose credibility on defence is in tatters, who's going to keep the flag flying if Johnny Foreigner decides to take a pop at us? Moreover, there's NATO's Article 5 which say something like "an armed attack against one NATO member shall be considered an attack against them all". In that circumstance what's the top man going to deploy? Sharp sticks? Harsh words? Economic-migrant car-washers armed with wet sponges?

Conservatives: As a party they seem to have it in the bag already, but there's no way that our current candidate will get my vote even if his gaffer was [insert your preferred benevolent deity here]. My views on our current candidate's 30 years as Our Man In Havana At The Conning Towers are well-documented on this blog and don't need repeating here.

So that leaves the Greens. The party that favours ungreen* wind-farms here, there and everywhere. No thanks.

I think it may well be a case of "None of the above".

But I'll still go to the Polling Station even if it's only to bait the tellers.

Maybe I should have written it in all known languages, as it's clear that they can't read (or can't be arsed to read) the English version of the form which I've printed, completed, laminated and stuck to the front door directly above the letterbox, the flap of which also bears a "No Junk Mail" sign:

I suppose they've "lost" all of the properly-completed forms which I've sent to Freepost ROYAL MAIL CUSTOMER SERVICES this year.

This is a re-hash of my post of 7th May 2010. Not much has changed, so for obvious reasons it's a copy/paste job with only minor edits and additions...

For 30 years we've had the same MP, and in all that time we've only ever seen him once, when he was in Hinckley town centre drumming up support for his re-election in 2015. Hardly surprising, really, as he still lives nowhere near his Bosworth constituency, he still lives 140 miles away in Sussex, which is still even further away from Bosworth than Westminster is. He's tried to claim expenses for astrology software and for an intimate relationships course, and was guilty of accepting cash-for-questions. He believes that homeopathy can fix the NHS. He's still never responded directly to any of the questions that I've put to him, preferring to "sub out" the job to somebody else. We had high hopes that he'd be ousted in 2010, and even higher hopes in 2015, but, despite calls for him to stand down he's going to be campaigning for yet another term.

His obsession with using his parliamentary position to campaign for homeopathy is, to me, just plain wrong. He's paid to represent his constituents, not to pursue his own personal agenda.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not anti-homeopathy, I'm not anti-Tory, I don't much mind which party ends up in government and if the Tories had decided to adopt a different candidate here I would have given him/her due consideration for my vote. No, I just want to see the back of this self-serving fool. Actually, seeing ANY part of this fool is unlikely. He's like the absentee landlord, happy to accept the rent-money but never there when you need him to fix the property. It's not what's expected of a public servant, and certainly not what I expect of my representative in Parliament.

A "Barrow-in-a-Box"... with only one moving part, seven components and a handful of nuts & bolts, drawing up accurate assembly instructions really ought to have been a doddle.

In an episode of madness we decided to defy male instinct and years of engineering & assembly experience. Instead, we followed the instructions to the letter, just to see how things would work out. What could possibly go wrong?

You can find the instructions here in .pdf format, but to save you the hassle I'll walk you through the odd bits.

First up - tools required. It says that I'd need a flat-bladed screwdriver for the M8 bolts which are parts 7 and 9:

but that's bollocks, parts 7 and 9 are all Torx-headed:

And then there are the 2-off front supports - parts 6. Whoever specced the folding of the ends of these is an idiot:

And just for good measure, whoever made those supports didn't deburr them, so they have edges like ragged razors.

Eventually we bent the supports into submission with minimal effort, tightened all of the fittings, and stood back to admire our handiwork.

It doesn't live up to the expectations I had for it being a "HEAVY DUTY BUILDERS BARROW" (yes, on the box they omitted the apostrophe). Compared to my previous barrow it's cheap and tacky even though, allowing for inflation, I paid almost twice as much for it. The old one's front support was 32mm dia 1.5mm wall powder-coated steel tube and was part of the 2-piece welded-together braced frame, this one has those 2 pressed straps which, although described as "robust", appear to have been made from compressed KitKat foil - if I can bend them easily by hand, I can't see them withstanding the rated 150kg load for very long. They are bolted to a 3-piece 30mm dia 1mm wall painted steel frame that's held together by 2 bolts and wishful thinking.

After having previously had barrows with pneumatic tyres, and after having to replace the tyres or inner-tubes every few years due to punctures or perishing, this time I opted for a puncture-proof job. I've used such barrows before and they've been fine, but this one is awful - there's no "give" or "bounce" in the tyre, it may as well have had an iron-banded wooden wheel off an old hay-cart. The axle is the shank of a long M10 low-grade steel bolt sleeved with a bit of flimsy 12mm dia steel tube, unlike the old one which had an axle of hefty galvanised 32mm dia 2mm wall tube.

The tray's pre-galv steel is a gauge or two thinner than my old one and the edges are turned but not re-turned, so there are exposed sharp and ragged edges which have already cut my hands and gloves.

And the nuts... barrows have to put up with a lot of abuse, so there's a fair chance of nuts coming loose, therefore locking-washers or nyloc nuts are what's needed, but no, here we have low-grade soft-steel flanged nuts and no washers, except for the nut on the axle-bolt which isn't even flanged.

I'm not impressed. An Eastern European migrant builder may well think it's the Bentley of barrows, but a burly Brummie brickie would probably think it's more of a Trabant.

Unless you want to mouseover the charts to see how they look with spurious data removed, hence showing the real trends.

Click here to show or hide contents

So far only points for week 28 (12/01/2017) have been removed in the mouseovers. You might recall that I ranted about those results here. The serum ferritin result of 998 from week 15 (10/10/2016) has long been discarded as pure fantasy. With those dodgy results removed there are clear ongoing downward trends to the whites and the newts over the last 4 to 5 months, and the whites are now bang on bottom-limit. But it's not important, they say.

In my opinion, the latest value for the Serum Ferritin (499, week 38, 23/03/2017) looks to be, well, rather convenient, seeing as they were aiming for a target of 500, and the previous three values were 696, 643 and 642. And yes, I did tell them almost exactly that at the consultation, and I also told them that the previous week the blood-letting staff at LGH were quite concerned that their venesection protocol had ceased to be effective. Time will tell if I have to declare that result as dodgy, but for now I'm letting it stand as either a valid but surprising good result or as testimony to data creativity.

But it's not important, as they say.

Yet for some reason they have changed my 6-weekly checks back to 4-weekly.

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